Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was quick to seize on good news from market analytics firm International Data Corp.'s (IDC) survey of international phone sales. While the report unsurprisingly showed Android to be the king of virtually every region, the report showed that in some nations Windows Phones are outselling Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) iPhone.

But before Apple fans explode with indignation, yes there is a catch. Windows Phone outsold the iPhone in a smattering of emerging markets, where the high price of Apple's trendy phone is probably a barrier to sales success. In total Windows Phone led the iPhone in Argentina, India, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and "rest of central and eastern Europe".

The success in India is a pretty big deal because that's going to be a huge smartphone market. But other regions like Ukraine, South Africa, and "rest of... Europe" (smaller countries) are all markets of 100,000 or less smartphone units annually.

The Lumia 520 [Image Source: Nokia]

The arrival of low-end Windows Phone devices -- namely Nokia Oyj.'s (HEX:NOK1V) Lumia 520/620 -- has certainly boosted Windows Phone. Much like Android, Microsoft and its third-party hardware partners appear to be starting their assault on the iPhone at the low-end. While today's flagship Android phones put the iPhone's hardware to shame, the earliest Androids were largely budget devices.

It remains to be seen, though, whether Windows Phone can duplicate Android's successful creep into the high-end of the market. Microsoft is betting big on the Windows Phone Blue refresh, which will likely be the next major platform refresh. That update is expected to land sometime in the October/November window. The good news for Windows Phone 8 device owners is that Microsoft reportedly will be supporting current generation devices in the upgrade this time around.

quote: A game is processor-intensive with a load that cannot efficiently be spread around since a lot of the calculations are intertwined with each other and cannot be split apart, processed independently and returned as they are completed. Even if the load is split, it still needs to be recombined and it still needs to wait on the main thread. This adds processing overhead, increases memory usage and adds a thick layer of complexity to the code among other things.

Yup, all this. There are still serious diminishing returns with more than two cores. The whole reason quad cores finally made sense with the i-series CPUs is because they could disable unused cores while increasing the clock frequency on one or two. High performance single-thread applications like games could finally benefit, whereas before with a Core Quad you'd be stuck with a slower clocked CPU and extra cores doing little or nothing.